How to Photograph and Process Forests

so welcome to another lovely day on the west coast of Scotland it's flat gray overcast the rain comes in heavy from time to time but yet again we're out in the field and the reason we were out in the field is because it's beautiful out here and it's better than sitting in the office so being able to come out into the landscape on a daily basis is something of a gift that we have now in the last video I was talking about atmosphere and if we were outside the woods it would still be quite misty and it's rainy and the lights very diffused but in here the wet weather has made it really saturated so all these deep deep greens have become super saturated and and that can be just as much of a stimulus as a sunrise or a sunset or some other glorious colors in the landscape so what I really want to focus on today are is a combination of dynamics and color and that way we we get people to engage with the photographs because of these factors so in the last video we talked about atmosphere in this video we're gonna look at dynamics and color and how they interact to engage us and then in processing I think it would be good to look at these in terms of how we can increase depth increase engagement increase impact whilst retaining the feel and the sort of spirit of the woods here so I'm gonna carry on working the scene because it's really quite attractive and then we'll move back into the office and see what we can do with this guy [Music] [Applause] [Music] forest photography is about noticing differences it's about recognizing things that are different from everything else and it's about seeing the trees within the forest so when we make images in here it's really about isolation the wider angled lens as we use tend to include too much where as a medium zoom of 35 50 70 millimetres allow us to be a little bit more focused on what we want to include in the frame so in this video I want to have a look at some images that I made in forests all over the world and decide what is it about those images that that's working or not working so rather than carrying on nattering away I think we will continue with our exploration of this beautiful forest [Music] so I'm Christian and I have been in these woods now for a couple of hours and we're only about 10 minutes from the house but it's the first time I've ever been here because the area were moved to is so rich and diverse and now superficially the energy and the mood of this shoot was was a bit subdued it was it was a sopping morning and very grey and I felt a certain obligation to come out here and do something because I'm doing my 366 project and plus I'm trying to record these movies about atmosphere and in color and gloomy days and what to do in gloomy days so there was a certain pressure and once I got over that hole I'm here to achieve something expectation things got an awful lot better and we started noticing things and engaging with things in a very organic way now I wanted to just reiterate how joyful and experienced this has been is it a lovely day no are we getting wet yes you know is it cold not terribly but it's not very pleasant and and we've just had a wonderful time in here for a couple of hours and hopefully when we get back to the office I be able to look at some of these files that I've been taking these sketches in the landscape and use those sketches to create images that evoke something of the spirit of the place the energy of the place and the mood of the place and and we'll look at different ways and we can use what we have to create engagement and to create depth and to create atmosphere from what's already there and just enhancing those things so yeah tend to go back for some lunch one of an Christine's jumbo salads I think and then we can get working this afternoon what are the beautiful things about forests is that you can definitely go in there on misty cloudy days one of the big advantages of that is that there are no harsh highlights in particular that can be quite distracting especially in the sky now on cloudy days and misty days it's really easy to go into the forest and find other things that are going to stimulate us it's very easy to be distracted I suppose by a great light all the time and it's it's super and this is a video about how to photograph in pure light or on cloudy days donkeys so in the forest I've made most of the images that I really like on cloudy down days so in Lightroom here let's have a look at a couple of those that I've taken on previous trips in particular on the Canary Islands where I like to go and photograph forests and then one that we were making earlier on oh it's in the field here so if we look at this image we can see that it's this is one that's being worked already we can see that this has got lots of dark mysterious atmosphere and the the highlights the luminous areas are really quite small in the frame but that's key because it's luminosity that lures us is what attracts us and if we can limit the luminosity into specific areas then that's very much where the human eye is gonna go looking for details so this image is a combination of dynamic angular tree-trunks and diffused mysterious mist and and atmosphere and it's an image I particularly love is it's just something I don't really really like and I'm gonna show you how to make this effect in processing the next image also is another one taken round about at the same time in the same location and it's been processed there are slightly more optimistic and uplifting feel it's not quite as dark it's not quite as ominous and it's not quite as oppressive and perhaps the processing is more a reflection of my state of mind and sort of personality at the time of the processing then actually the event when I was there because what we'll see even when we look at the next image which was a raw file so this one is a raw file this is straight out at the camera we're gonna work this one and look at ways that we can create dynamics atmosphere and luminosity without being so explicit because this is obviously quite explicit and we can see everything that's going on and it's really a case of the less you show the more people have to look so if I open up this one in the develop module the easiest way to create atmosphere Artemis to create mystery is to document and I do tend to darken more or less until I start to get some clipping know that has to go quite a long way before it clips so that's what 2.35 stops under if I get my whites later and pull it to the right you can see that that's instantly introduced apps and will be tons of contrast and the only clipping we have is up there in the top of the of the file now it's my intention actually to crop this down into a four by five and I think about there would suit me and the areas of clipping are fairly in substantial and making kinda get rid of that we can either just pull back the whites a little bit but the areas are so small that it's really insignificant know that overall contrast is much greater and contrast really translates it to impact but if the whole image is contrast II we end up in this situation where it becomes a bit too much and what we want to try and do is to create differences to create transitions from areas of higher contrast through two areas of less contrast and I'll show you how to do that now one of the simplest ways of creating more atmosphere in an image is to cool it and if I cool that overall you can see the mist and the background starting to get cooler and it has pooled then the green somewhat has made them also the cooler so what we can do is we can go into the hue/saturation aren't the hue saturation and luminance panel and using the hue we can pull those yellowy green tones to the left slightly and what that's doing is it's bringing the warmth back into them it's making them warmer and yellower again and therefore we're now in a situation we've got cooler mist and warmer highlights if I turn off the J key to get rid of that clipping the second thing we can do is increase the amount of mist that we have in here and the easiest way to do that is with the D haze and most people or D haze was kind of designed to be used to reduce mistiness I obviously like to use it to create mist either so I'm gonna gank it a good way to the left I had some exposure and if I just paint through in there so it's kind of in the background now we're painting in that mist in all those areas we are it's in the bag but some of it bleeds into the front and the easiest way to get rid of that now is with the range mask and with the luminance we can just get that pull in the arrow from the left hand side and what that will do is will start to ignore the shadows and I'm bringing it all the way up to the mid-tones so if I turn that off you can see what it was like before hand and if I turn it on we can now see it after and what that's doing is it's creating luminosity in the background and what that does is it drags us through the frame it makes us want to leave the front the contrast the illuminated joyas mossy branches and take us through into the misty woods no I process by feel and for me now I'm gonna probably want to darken this one a bit more because I like him dark to be fair no like I've got no clipping in my blacks so I'm really quite happy with that a really useful thing to consider when you're processing is to look at the implications especially but anonymous seems like this what is the implication of flipping them because if I go into the photo and flip horizontally that changes it from reading one way to reading the other way and it means know that the brightest part of the frame is up here in the right-hand side and that makes a little bit more accessible it's worth considering in this case I think I prefer the way it was before because by pushing that luminosity up into the top left-hand side of the frame it's actually putting it into a position there's not so natural for us to want to go and look and therefore it's it's quite a demanding thing and therefore it creates a little bit of tension the geometry of this file is a bit dynamic and therefore it's a tense scene and we can add more tension something I can do to alleviate that somewhat is come back in with another adjustment brush and pull up some warm light and luminosity and pull it into this top left-hand corner top right hand corner there and by illuminating that corner it's helping to keep the eye over on that right-hand side dodging and burning is basically a balance between where the eye wants to go and where we wanted to go where we want to lead it and it's a very very useful skill now we don't have to over process this I think it's good to look at the before and after and get a general feel for the differences and what the implications of those differences are there's more contrast than the right hand side therefore there's more impact there is more luminosity in the right hand side therefore there is more impact the mistiness of the fog in the background is contrast now against the contrast is contrasted against the contrast there's a sentence for blooper reel the dynamic contrast and the detail contrast in the foreground is juxtaposed with the misty diffused contrast in the back so we have another transition it's all about transitions detailed to atmosphere colored so and warm tours to cool tones so that should be a reasonable little snapshot of how we to do these things if we now look at the second example of the photograph we were working in the field earlier on obviously we don't have the mist and the diffusion that was present in tenerife there was no fog in the forest so obviously the the trees that are in the background are way more explicit than they are or than they were in tenerife images but we can use a similar process to try and create more separation between the foreground in the background and therefore make the foreground tree stick out a little bit better and and let's have a look at how we're going to try and do that dropping the exposure again helps to reduce the image just to its luminosity now we have a lot of yellowy green in this and we can create contrast instead of using the whites later which is global no that is obviously going to increase the luminosity of the trees but it's also going to increase the luminosity of the sky so if I look at the HSL slider again and come into the luminance and just grab my yellow and green tones and increase their luminance we can see quite clearly if I turn that off and then on the only thing in the frame that's been affected is the moss now that's a good indicator because I can find other ways to increase the luminance and saturation of that moss by using the blue saturation slider which is going to increase it further as you can see now that the branches are sticking out way more against the background than they were before we can exaggerate this further by cooling the background now we've cool these green tones again as we have in previous examples so I'm going to grab the hue slider and pull them back a little bit into the greeny yellows and now we have a situation where we've created a cool background and the warmer foreground and those branches are really sticking out against that background and we can proceed with that a little bit further what I'm gonna try and do here is a similar effect we did last time grab the D haze and see if I can paint in the background there if I darken those background areas where I brought in the D haze and also use some negative clarity what I'm doing is I'm taking detail out of the background I'm diffusing it the D haze I'm taking clarity away from it I'm darkening it and what I was basically doing is saying don't look at me because if it was brighter and more detail with more clarity it would be saying look at me this is the greatest trick or the greatest technique that we can utilize to control what we're going to look at and were warned to ignore this is a photograph about a mossy tree it's not about the broader context of the forest if I take this temperature and cool that background I've just painted in I'll go too far and then pull the back slightly like cooling that background more it's saying don't look here if I come in with a new brush and zero that effect and I just add some warm light a little bit of texture and if I just paint in across some of those branches just where the light is already what we do not want to do is paint light anywhere where it is not because what tends to happen is it starts to look really weird Computers really acting up again let's let this finish off try not to think about a new computer so as you can see with these adjustments by creating a cooler background cooler darker more diffused less explicit and emphasized in the foreground increasing the saturation and the luminosity and the detail and the yellows and the greens and the foreground boulders and tree branches we're stripping this image down to its bare essentials if I was to go back into the basic title there and just darken this image further and further and further you will see that we get to that point where it it just becomes tree branches no that's maybe a little bit gloomy but at the end of the day you know if I was to pull in a gradient and just up the waves in that foreground there so that that's where the contrast is then we're starting to strip the image down to its bare essentials which is a mossy tree in a beautiful forest on a dark and gloomy day so just to summarize we're in a position where we can affect luminosity in numerous ways using the hue saturation luminance channel or palette in lightroom we can use the d haze button to increase mistiness and ethereal nature and backgrounds which will create more separation with the foreground and again I want to use that word transitions one thing to another thing helps to separate so I hope you found this short processing video of some value and the next time you go into the forest you'll recognize that there's a luminosity there even if it's on a dull Bay I'll lower the colors to be your luminosity and allow the depth and atmosphere of the forest to create separation between your foreground and your backgrounds also darkening your image is significantly in Lightroom or post-production will give them a lot more atmosphere if you found this useful please click the subscribe button the thumbs up and the Bell notification and that way are going to build to get these videos to you without any further delay so I hope you've enjoyed it I wish you all great lights or great atmosphere whenever you're out next and you can go into the field to immerse yourself in the beauty of the landscape and hopefully make some images that are a reflection of that relationship that you're having so thank you very much and have a good time everyone [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Expressive Photography

Views: 18,245

Keywords: Lightroom, Photography, Alister Benn, tutorials, learn, how to, photoshop, landscape photography, dodge and burn, luminosity masks, guide, processing, forests, forest photography, tutorial

Id: ao1omXbwc20

Length: 23min 52sec (1432 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 02 2020